Digging Into Digg – What’s Behind the Curtain

DIgg.com has shot up from non-existence this year to be a net publishing powerhouse, challenging the longstanding giant Slashdot for the crown of nerd news. The way Digg.com did it doesn’t seem too complicated, they allow the democracy of users to pick the stories instead of a short list of editors.

Peering into the Digg.com social framework a bit further as part of research I’m doing for more social features in SWiK, I found that the system really is very simple, but that there is an interesting ecosystem at play behind the scenes of just the front page.

There are five groups of people who make digg.com what it is.

Bosworth continues on that of the five groups of people who make Digg work, the readers, two levels of voters, submitters, and publishers, the readers are the most important, the ones who click the dugg links to view the highly dugg posts. While they may not “digg” a post, contributing to its success in the Digg food chain, a popular post can “bring down servers ala Slashdotting” with the high demand of viewers.

If you are a fan of Digg, this is definitely worth a read. If you are a fan of any tagging service, like Technorati or del.icio.us, these posts are also worth a read as they take you behind the scenes of social bookmarking and tagging to understand the way the process works. If you are a website administrator, drop everything and read these now. They are a highlight of what SEO needs need to be met in the future.